Tailspinning Texas Needs Success in San Jose

(Credit: Texas Stars)

The Stars come into this week's series against San Jose with a losing record for the first time this season. After an initial win-one, lose-one stint, Texas rattled off five in a row but has been 4-9-2 since that point, erasing all of their gains and sinking to sub-.500.

This week's games were not originally set to be a four games in five nights affair. Wednesday's game in a reschedule from the February contest that was rescheduled due to the winter storm. It was supposed to be in Texas, and the game will reflect Texas as the home team despite the location. The Stars will get last change and the other on-ice benefits that come with playing at home without the off-ice benefits. Of course, fans will not be one of those advantages shifting for the Barracuda as they will be playing in an empty arena.

The Barracuda just won their last outing on Sunday against Ontario, putting them at 9-8-4-2. They've stayed mostly even keel all season, never straying too far from a .500 record. Alexander True and Joachim Blichfield lead the scoring with 16 and 15 points, respectively. No one else on the active roster has struck double digit points yet. In the goaltending department, Zachary Sawchenko and Sam Harvey man the nets but have just seven games in the record between them. Josef Korenar and Alexei Melnichuk are listed as inactive on TheAHL.com but Melnichuk is on the roster on the Barracuda website. Either way, he has the worst numbers of the bunch at 2-4-3 with a sub-.900 SV%. Sawchenko is the top of the group at .917.

Texas will likely again be without the services of Nikita Scherbak. The forward took a brutal cut to the face on Saturday night. There are some gruesome photos out there on his own Twitter account if you'd like to find them, but I don't think anyone needs that directly inserted into this post.

Injuries, scratches, and notes:
Scherbak (face injury)